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RELIGIOUS TESTS 



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PRO VINCIAL PENNS YL VAN I A. 



A PAPER READ BEFORE THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF 

PENNSYLVANIA AT A MEETING HELD 

NOVEMBER g, i88j. 



CHARLES J. STILL E. 



RELIGIOUS TESTS 



PROVINCIAL PENNSYLVANIA. 



No provisions of the Constitution of the United States are 
more familiar to us and more clearly express the universal 
sentiment of the American people, or are in more perfect 
harmony with the historic consciousness of the nation, than 
those which forbid the ISTational Government to establish 
any form of religion or to prescribe any religious test as a 
qualification for office held under its authority. Almost 
every other general principle of government embodied in 
that instrument has been discussed and argued about, and 
its application in particular cases resisted and questioned, 
until the intention of those who framed it seems lost in the 
Serbonian bog of controversy^ yet no one has ever denied 
the rightfulness of the principle of religious liberty laid 



4 Religious I'csts in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

down in the Constitution, and, so far as I know, only one 
instance has occurred in our history (that presented by the 
question concerning the polj'gamous marriages of the Mor- 
mons, claimed by them to be religious, but declared by the 
laws of the United States to be criminal) in which it has 
become necessary for the Supreme Court of the United 
States to determine judicially what are the bounds of the 
religious liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. In that 
case {Reynolds vs. the United States, 98 Supreme Court Re- 
ports) Chief-Justice Waite thus defines these boundaries : 

"Laws are made for the government of actions, and while 
they cannot interfere with men's religious belief and opin- 
ions, they may with the practice. Suppose one religiously 
believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of re- 
ligious worship, would it be seriously contended that the 
civil government could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice ? 
To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of 
religious belief superior to the law of the land. Governmejit 
could exist only in name under such circumstances." 

It is clear, then, that there are bounds to religious liberty, 
even under the Constitution and laws of the United States. 
The line must be drawn somewhere, and the Supreme Court 
has drawn it, for the present at least, at the point where the 
religious liberty guaranteed by the Constitution is invoked 
to justify polygamy and human sacrifices. 

It is a curious and significant fact, showing the hearty 
general concurrence of the American people in these pro- 
visions, that while the Constitution of the United States 
does not prohibit the different States from establishing any 
form of religion and imposing such religious tests as each 
may deem proper, yet in point of fact, during the last hun- 
dred years, no form of religion has ever been established by 
the authority of any one of the States. Religious tests for 
office are as unknown under our State as under our National 
Government, although in many of the State Constitutions 
there is a reverent recognition of Almighty God as the 
foujider of all human governments. 

We are so familiar in these days with the practical applica- 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 5 

tion of tills principle of religious liberty that we are apt to 
forget that up to the period when it was guaranteed by the 
provisions of the Constitution of the United States it had 
never been recognized by law-makers as one of those so- 
called indefeasible natural rights of man in society, such as 
the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, for the protec- 
tion of which human governments have been chiefly designed. 
Of all the novel and untried experiments made by our fathers 
in the scheme of national government which they adopted, 
none was so untried and novel as this. 

Theorists, especially in the eighteenth century, had talked 
much about religious liberty, and many philosophic writers 
had portrayed the evils of intolerance, and of persecution 
for the sake of religious opinion, as shown by the experience 
of mankind; but for the first time in the history of the world 
the framers of our National Constitution laid it down as a 
fundamental principle of government, that here there should 
be a perpetual divorce between the National Government and 
every form of religious establishment, and that while every 
man should be at liberty to express and maintain his relig- 
ious opinions, those opinions should not abridge or enlarge 
his rights or capacity as a citizen. 

What the result of the constant recognition ever since of 
these principles has been here it is certainly not necessary 
to enlarge upon. We may be permitted, however, to point 
with justifiable pride to the eftect of our example on other 
nations. If the practice of universal toleration be, as Lord 
Brougham called it, " the noblest innovation of modern 
times," we must not forget that the signal for this great 
revolution came from this country, and that our success has 
made the practical application of a doctrine untried until we 
adopted it, because it was universally regarded as a highly 
dangerous theory, one of the most admirable and beneficial 
instruments of government ever emplo3'ed for ruling man- 
kind. This country has made at least two grand contri- 
butions to modern civilization, — the peculiarly American 
ideas of civil liberty and religious liberty. Both of these 
ideas found embodiment for the first time in history in our 



6 Religious Tests in Provimial Pennsylvania. 

national declarations and laws, and thej found place there 
principally through the energy and philosophic insight of 
one man, — Thomas Jefferson. These ideas have become 
the most fruitful of all our political doctrines, and have gone 
forth from us to mould, for good or for evil, the destinies of 
the world. 

It is important for the purpose we have in hand that we 
should recognize distinctly the dift'erence between religious 
liberty and religious toleration. What is novel and peculiar 
about our system is that it establishes in its widest sense 
religious liberty, and that it provides for its maintenance 
sanctions and guarantees of the same binding force as those 
by which life, liberty, and property are secured, such as trial 
by jury, the habeas corpus, and the provisions in regard to 
the obligation of contracts. What, then, is religious liberty 
as understood and practised here for nearly a hundred years 
under the protection of law? "It consists in the right 
guaranteed by the laws of a country to each one of its 
citizens to maintain and propagate any religious opinion or 
celebrate any form of religious worship he may think proper, 
provided it is not in conflict with the fundamental ideas upon 
which the civil community is based. It includes protection 
for worship and property, and recognizes the right of re- 
ligious association for such objects." The first enactment 
of this principle into a law on this continent is found in the 
Constitution of Pennsylvania of 1776, and shortly after- 
wards in the " Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," 
adopted by the General Assembly of Virginia in October, 
1777. This bill was drafted by Mr. Jefferson. It provides 
" that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any 
religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall 
be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body 
or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his re- 
ligious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to 
profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in mat- 
ters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, 
enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." 

Religious liberty thus defined excludes, of course, any 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 7 

idea of a State or Established Church. Religious tolera- 
tion, on the contrary, presupposes the existence of such a 
Church. The theory that the Church and the State are only 
two aspects of the same body politic (commonly called the 
Erastian theory) had prevailed generally in the Christian 
world. Catholic and Protestant, from the time of the Em- 
peror Constantine down to that of the American Revolution. 
Heresy w^as made a crime against the State by the Roman 
Emperor, punishable, as other crimes, by the civil authority. 
So closely, indeed, were the State and the Church identified 
in Europe, that for fifteen hundred years to the orthodox 
Christian believer the heretic was worse than a foreign 
enemy; he was a revolted subject. Previous to the great 
revolution, however, which rent asunder the Church in the 
sixteenth century, the penalties against heresy were chiefly 
employed to punish defections from the faith, and as a 
means to restore to the bosom of the Church those who had 
erred. After the Reformation, a long and bloody experi- 
ence taught both statesmen and churchmen that it was im- 
possible to make men change their religious opinions by 
force or by the operation of penal laws. The people of 
Northern and Western Europe were permanently divided 
in their religious opinions, and it became more and more 
clear every day that an impassable barrier separated the 
populations of the different countries, which no fear of 
Church censures or of the penalties denounced by the State 
against heresy could ever bridge over. 

Under these circumstances the penal laws against heresy 
in each country were employed for a purpose different from 
that for which they had been previously used. Conversion 
or restoration to the faith was no longer the main object. 
The doctrine, cujiis regie ejus religio, that the religion of each 
country should be that of its ruler. Catholic or Protestant, 
became the prevalent one after the Reformation, This gave 
the power or made it the duty of the Chief of the State to 
prescribe for his people the religious belief and worship to 
which they should conform. This was not done, primarily 
or chiefly at least, because uniformity of belief was essential 



8 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

to a duo obedience of God's command, although of course 
such was the pretext, but rather because, as the history of 
that age clearly shows us, opposition to the religion of the 
State was the rallying-cry of those who were in rebellion 
against the authority of the ruler, civil as well as ecclesias- 
tical. The laws against heresy, therefore, were used as a 
chief support of existing dynasties. Conformity was the 
test of loyalty. Non-conformity was evidence not only of 
heresy, but of disloyalty also. Dissenters were punished 
by the severest civil disabilities ; indeed, they became prac- 
tically aliens in their own country. In the civil and relig- 
ious wars in France during the last half of the sixteenth 
century, in the Thirty Years' War in Germany, and to a 
great extent in the war of the rebellion in England, while 
the struggle was apparently to decide who should be the 
civil ruler of these countries, it was understood on all hands 
that the victorious party would impose its own religious 
creed and worship on the vanquished, and treat all subdued 
rebels as confirmed heretics. Of course in those days no 
one believed in the principle of religious toleration, still less 
had any one a conception of religious liberty. In this re- 
spect the Reformers and the Catholics stood on the same 
ground. While the Pope excommunicated Henry IV., 
Queen Elizabeth, and the leaders of the Reformation in 
Germany, Luther invoked the civil sword against the Ana- 
baptists ; Calvin burned Servetus ; Cranmer burned Jane 
Boucher; Parker and Whitgift persecuted the Puritans; 
and if Cartwright, the first English Presbyterian, had been 
in their place, he would doubtless have persecuted in the 
same way the Baptists and Independents. 

It was found impossible, however, to make men loyal by 
forcing upon them subscription to religious creeds distaste- 
ful to them, just as it had proved a hopeless task to make 
them religious by threats of persecution and martyrdom. 
It became therefore necessary throughout ISTorthern and 
Central Europe, if there was to be any peace in communi- 
ties hopelessly divided in religious belief, to recognize, how- 
ever unwillingly, this fact, and to adopt some policy of gov- 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 9 

ernment which should meet the difficulties presented by it. 
It was decided not to give up the theory of the State Church 
as rightfully claiming the allegiance of all persons in the 
community, but to allow to Dissenters from it as little tolera- 
tion for their peculiar forms of belief and worship as might 
be consistent with the safety and supremacy of the State re- 
ligion, in which it was supposed that the peace and safety 
of the State government were involved. The grant of this 
limited toleration was a necessity born of the peculiar con- 
ditions of each country, and we find examples of it in such 
well-known acts as the Edict of Xantes, issued by Henry 
TV. in 1598, in those articles of the Peace of TTestphalia in 
1648 which gave a certain restricted toleration to Protes- 
tants in the Catholic States of Germany, and especially in 
the famous Act (strangely called an act of toleration) of the 
first year of TTilliam and Mary in England, in 1689, the 
first Toleration Act in that country, which exempted, on 
certain conditions, Dissenters from the Church of England 
(but not including in those exemptions Roman Catholics, 
Socinians, or Jews) from the penalties and disabilities im- 
posed by the laws against non-conformity. 

I have given this slight historical sketch of the relations 
between the governments of the different countries in 
Europe from which our fathers came, and Christianity as 
variously organized in those countries during the seven- 
teenth century, in order to show how little encouragement 
their example and practice gave to those statesmen who 
embodied the principle of religious liberty in our Constitu- 
tion. Everywhere was found a State or Established religion, 
and evervwhere (except, perhaps, in Holland) civil disabili- 
ties were imposed upon those who dissented from it. It is, 
of course, well known that the intolerable burdens which 
they suffered from the laws against non-conformity formed 
the chief motive which induced most of the emigrants, es- 
pecially the English, to seek for quiet homes on these shores ; 
and yet it is equally well kno^Ti that notwithstanding the 
bitter experience which so many of the exiles had had of 
the evils of an established religion in their native lands, and 



10 Rdiglom Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

the sacrifices which they had made to escape from them, the 
history of this country during the Colonial period shows 
that some form of religion, dissent from which involved 
serious civil disabilities, was established in nearly all of the 
Colonies by virtue of either the local or the imperial law. 
The principle of a State or Established religion, so far at 
least as it made the full enjoyment of a man's civil rights 
dependent in a good degree upon his conformity to it, pre- 
vailed, with the exception of a limited period during the 
early days, throughout the Colonies from the settlement of 
Virginia in 1609 down to the period of the American 
Revolution; and such was the case notwithstanding the 
principles and the example of such great founders as Roger 
Williams, Lord Baltimore, and William Penn, of whose 
beneficent legislation in regard to religious toleration our 
Colonial codes at the time of the Revolution bore scarcely 
a trace. The truth is that during the Colonial period we 
were essentially a nation of Protestants, with fewer discord- 
ant elements outside Protestantism than were then to be 
found in any country of Europe, and that we, forced to do 
so, either by our own earnest conviction that such was the 
true method of supporting religion, or by the laws of the 
mother-country, took similar methods of maintaining and 
perpetuating our Protestantism, excluding those who dis- 
sented from it from any share in the government, and 
frankly adopting the policy which had prevailed in England 
from the time of Queen Elizabeth. 

It seems strange that in a country and during a period 
when the slightest symptom of an encroachment on the 
part of the Crown or the Parliament upon what we claimed 
as our civil rights was jealously watched and warmly pro- 
tested against, there should seem to have been no out- 
spoken opposition of a general nature against ecclesiastical 
arrangements such as those I have described. There were, 
it is true, in some of the Colonies, especially New York, at 
times, " ineffectual murmurings" against laws which forced 
people to pay taxes for the support of a ministry whose 
teachings were not in harmony with the religious sentiment 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 11 

of the great mass of the inhabitants, and in Pennsylvania 
there was a long and at last a successful struggle to induce 
the Imperial Government to regard the aiSrmation of a 
Quaker as equivalent to the oath of another man ; but if 
there were an_y men in our Colonial history who, after the 
example of Williams, Penn, and Lord Baltimore, lifted up 
their voices to protest, as these men had done, against the 
violation of the principle of religious liberty here, I have 
not been able to discover their names. The only subject of 
a quasi-ecclesiastical nature which appears to have excited 
general interest and to have met with determined opposi- 
tion was a scheme at one time said to have been in contem- 
plation of sending Bishops to this country. It was opposed, 
not so much because it was thought to be the first step 
towards forming a Church establishment in this country, 
as because the Colonists had a peculiar abhorrence of the 
methods of enforcing the jurisdiction of the English Church 
as they were familiar to them in the old country. "While 
the Colonists may have forgotten many of the sufferings 
which they had endured in England in consequence of their 
non-conformity, and even committed themselves to a theory 
of Church establishment, there was one thing they never 
could forget, and that was the arbitrary prelatical govern- 
ment of Laud and the High Commission, and upon this 
were founded the popular notions of the authority wielded 
by Bishops. 

From all this it would appear that Mr. Jefferson and his 
contemporaries, when they sought, at the beginning of the 
Revolution, to embody in fundamental laws the principle of 
absolute religious liberty, found as little in the history of 
the Colonies as in that of Europe to encourage them to hope 
for success in their experiment. 

I am well aware that these statements of the general 
prevalence of a principle here during the Colonial period, 
which in contrast to that now universally recognized I must 
call the principle of religious intolerance, will appear to 
many too wide and sweeping. But a very slight examina- 
tion of the provisions on this subject in the laws of the 



12 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

Colonies will, if I mistake not, produce a different impres- 
sion. In Virginia, where the English Church was early 
established by law and endowed, men who neglected or 
refused to bring their children to be baptized were punished 
by civil penalties ; Quakers were expelled from the Colony, 
and should they return thither a third time they were liable 
to capital punishment. Any one who denied the Trinity or 
the truth of the Christian religion was deprived by the Act 
of 1704 of his civil rights, and was rendered incapable of 
suing for any gift or legacy. In New England, except in 
Rhode Island, religious intolerance was very bitter. It is 
true that in Massachusetts, under the Charter of 1691, the 
power of committing those barbarous acts of persecution of 
which the theocracy under the old standing order had been 
guilty was taken away, and all Christians, save Roman 
Catholics, were permitted to celebrate their worship, yet 
none but members of the Congregational Church could be 
freemen, and all were taxed for the support of the ministry 
of that Church. In Maine, which was a District of Massa- 
chusetts, in ISTew Hampshire, and in Connecticut the same 
general system of religious intolerance prevailed. Con- 
formity was the inflexible rule throughout New England. 
In New York, the Dutch were protected by the provisions 
of the Treaty of Breda, which guaranteed them the pos- 
session of the property then held there for religious pur- 
poses, and their ecclesiastical organization. But the royal 
Governors of that Province expelled any Catholic priests 
who might be found within their territory, on the plea that 
they were inciting the Indians to revolt against the govern- 
ment, and they established the English Church, so far as it 
could be done in a Province where the Episcopalians were 
very few in number, by requiring each of the towns to raise 
money for the support of the clergy of that Church, by 
dividing the countr}^ into parishes, and by exercising the 
power of collating and inducting into these parishes such 
Episcopal Rectors as they thought fit. In New Jersey, after 
the surrender of the Charter, when the Colony came directly 
under the royal authority, in 1702, liberty of conscience was 



Religious Teds in Provincial Pennsylvania. 13 

proclaimed in favor of all except Papists and Quakers; 
but as the latter were required to take oaths as qualifica- 
tions for holding office or for acting as jurors or witnesses 
in judicial proceedings, they, of course the great mass of 
the population, were practically disfranchised. But the story 
of the arbitrary measures taken by the Governor of this 
Colony, Lord Cornbury, to exclude from office or the con- 
trol of public affiiirs all except those who conformed to 
the Church of England is too well known to need to be 
retold here. In Maryland the English Church was estab- 
lished in 1696, and one of the first acts of the newly- 
organized Province was to disfranchise those very Catholics 
and their children by whom the doctrine of religious lib- 
erty had been established in the law of 1649. In Carolina, 
after the fanciful and impracticable Constitution devised for 
it b_y the celebrated philosopher John Locke had been given 
up, hy which the English Church had been established and 
endowed in the Colony, the Church feeling was so strong 
and the determination to secure its supremacy so unyielding, 
that an Act was passed in 1704 requiring all members of the 
Assembly to take the sacrament according to the rites of the 
Church of England. Georgia, following the example of her 
I elder sisters, gave free exercise of religion to all except 
Papists, and such rights in this respect as any native-born 
I Englishman at that time possessed; a grant, as we have 
seen, of very doubtful value to English non-conformists, 
then ruled by the tender mercies of the Toleration Act. 

The result of this review is to show that in all the Colo- 
nies I have named, except perhaps Rhode Island, liberty of 
worship was the rule, excepting, of course, in the case of the 
Roman Catholics. Throughout the Colonies, at the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century, the man who did not conform 
to the established religion of the Colony, whether it was 
Congregationalism in ISTew England, or the Episcopal form 
j elsewhere, was not in the same position in regard to the 
enjoyment of either civil or religious rights as he who did 
conform. If he were a Roman Catholic, he was everywhere 
! wholly disfranchised. For him there was not even the legal 



14 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

right of public worship. If he were a Protestant differing 
in his creed from the type of Protestantism adopted by the 
rulers, although he could freely celebrate in nearly all the 
Colonies his peculiar form of worship, he was nevertheless 
excluded from any share in public affairs, lie could neither 
vote nor hold office, and he was forced to contribute to the 
support of a religious ministry whose teachings he in his heart 
abhorred. And this condition of things, extraordinary as it 
seems to us now, had not been brought about by any con- 
scious, arbitrary despotism on the part of the rulers, but 
was the work of good but narrow-minded men who were 
simply following out the uniform practice of the Christian 
world, and who no doubt honestly thought that in so acting 
they were doing the highest service by obeying the will of 
God. 

I have grouped together these accounts of the various 
civil disabilities under which dissenters from the legally 
established religion suffered in the different Colonies, in 
order to compare them with the Provincial legislation in 
Pennsylvania on the same subject. Of whatever sins of 
intolerance our forefathers in this Province may have been 
guilty (and I shall show presently that they were many), they 
were certainly not of the same nature as those of their neigh- 
bors. Here, no men or women were ever burned because 
they were heretics, or expelled from our territory because 
they were schismatics. We never punished any one on 
account of his speculative opinions, or because he did not 
conform to the rites and usages of any form of religion. 
We had no established Church here, whose clergy was sup- 
ported by general taxation. In every period of our history 
we permitted the celebration here of the rites of any form 
of Christianity, even that of the Roman Catholics, for it is 
said by Hildreth, the historian, that the Catholic Church of 
St. Joseph in this city was the only place in the original 
thirteen States where the mass was permitted to be publicly 
celebrated prior to the Revolution. All this is true; and yet 
it is equally true that no one ever held office in this Province, 
whether under the Crown or the Proprietary, from 1693 to 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 15 

1775, who %Yas not by law required, as an indispensable 
condition precedent, to make and subscribe a solemn decla- 
ration of his religious faith (which he confirmed by his oath 
or affirmation), in which he asserted that he did not believe 
that in the Holy Eucharist there was any transubstantiation, 
at any time or in any way, of the bread and wine used therein, 
and that he regarded the invocation of the Virgin Mary and 
of the saints as superstitious, and the Popish mass as idol- 
atrous. For many j^ears also, I cannot tell precisely for how 
many, the intending office-holder was obliged to declare 
under oath that he believed in the Holy Trinity according 
to the Athanasian definition of that sublime m3'Stery. And, 
more than this, none but Protestants were permitted by the 
Provincial laws to hold land for the erection of churches, 
schools, or hospitals, nor could any foreigner be naturalized 
unless he was a Protestant. 

Certainly, if this be a correct account of the civil dis- 
abilities imposed by the laws of this Province upon Roman 
Catholics, Socinians, or Unitarians, Jews, and Infidels, it 
presents a very difiierent picture of the condition of things 
here from that which has been generally accepted or given 
us by writers on Pennsylvania history. If we study the 
standard histories of the Province, such as those of Proud, 
Gordon, and Dr. Franklin, and the more general histories of 
the United States during the same period, in which accounts 
of Pennsylvania form so conspicuous a part, or if we consult 
the accounts of the life of William Penn given us by Clark- 
son or Janney, Dixon or Forster, we find these writers, dif- 
fering in many things, all agreeing upon one point, — namel}', 
that Pennsylvania during the Provincial period was the 
classic land of religious liberty ; that here freedom of con- 
science was the corner-stone of the foundation upon which 
the Commonwealth was built; that consequently the fabled 
golden age of history actually existed in this Province from 
the beginning to the year 1754, when the Quakers lost con- 
trol of the government; that the rapid increase of the popu- 
lation of the country and its wonderful prosperity during 
that period were chiefly due to the acceptance of Penn's 



16 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

invitation by the oppressed of every creed and nation, who 
came here to enjoy a perfect equality of rights, civil and 
religious, guaranteed to them by fundamental laws. This 
opinion of Penn's government is not confined to our local 
historians. The general judgment may be summed up^ in 
the statement of Edmund Burke in his " Account of the 
European Settlements in America." "William Penn," says 
Mr. Burke, " made the most perfect freedom, civil and re- 
ligious, the basis of his establishment, and this has done 
more towards the settling of the Province, and towards the 
settling of it in a strong and permanent manner, than the 
wisest regulations could have done on any other plan. All 
persons who profess to believe in one God are freely tol- 
erated, and those who believe in Jesus Christ, of whatever 
denomination, are not excluded from employments and 
posts." 

It is certainly an ungracious task for a Pennsylvanian to 
be forced to relegate stories so flattering to our local pride 
to that region of myth and legend, outside the domain of 
true histor}^, in which modern researches have placed so 
many tales of heroism and virtue long universally regarded 
as genuine history. Still, it is a consolation to know that if 
the truth must be spoken, and if we must hear it, it can in 
no way diminish the reverence with which we, in this gen- 
eration, regard the august and imposing historical figure of 
William Penn. I^or can a knowledge of the truth make us 
doubt for a moment the earnestness of our great Founder's 
convictions in regard to liberty of conscience, or of his per- 
sistent efforts to obtain its universal recos-nition. What I 
propose to show is, that what was done here in violation of 
that principle was done by a power over which he had no 
control. 

In regard to Penn himself, indeed, it seems to me that 
the more we study his life and career the grander and more 
heroic his character becomes. Of all the modern apostles 
of liberty of conscience his principles were the widest and 

' See Clarkson's Life of Penn, vol. ii. p. 422, et seq., where the English 
authorities on this point are collected. 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 17 

most comprehensive of any that had been np to that time 
promulgated. From 1670, shortly after he began his public 
ministry, down to 1689, when the famous English Toleration 
Act was passed (of which, although its provisions fell far 
short of what he desired, he is the reputed father), scarcely 
a month passed in which he did not earnestly advocate in 
tract and pamphlet and in public addresses the adoption by 
law of that universal principle of liberty of conscience which 
we now enjoy. While he himself held to a religious faith 
novel and strange, and regarded by the generation to which 
it w^as first preached as in the highest degree fanatical, yet 
he never swerved from advocating the principle of universal 
freedom of religious opinion as the outcome of that faith. 
Nothing is more striking than the honesty, nobleness, and 
courage with which he maintained at all times the univer- 
sality of that principle. In a speech before a Committee 
of the House of Commons, for instance, in 1678, when the 
people of England, panic-stricken by the terrors of the sup- 
posed Popish plot and seeking victims for their vengeance, 
were strangely led to assimilate the opinions of the Quakers 
wnth those attributed to the Roman Catholics and to deal out 
the same punishment to both, Penn thus calmly and nobly 
meets the storm of popular fury : 

" I am far from thinking it fit, because I exclaim against 
the injustice of whipping Quakers for Papists, that Papists 
should be whipped for their consciences. No; for though 
the hand, pretended to be lifted up against them, hath, I 
know not by what discretion, lighted heavily upon us, and 
we complain, yet we do not mean that any should take a 
fresh aim at them, or that they should come in our room, 
for we must give the liberty we ask, and cannot be false to 
our principles though it were to relieve ourselves ; for we 
have good will to all men, and w^ould have none sufier for a 
truly sober and conscientious dissent on any hand." 

It may be well said of William Penn that no one who 
ever sulFered so much for holding unpopular opinions did 
more to succor those who were in a common condemnation 
with him. His zeal in this matter no doubt frequently out- 



18 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania, 

went the bounds of worldly prudence, and led him into 
some mistakes of conduct for which he suffered bitterly. 
Still, of no man can it be more truly said, "E'en his failings 
leaned to virtue's side." 

He was a true apostle, his soul fired by enthusiasm for a 
great cause and for his " Holy Experiment." His best mon- 
ument is not to be found in the religious liberty which, in 
spite of his best efforts, he failed to establish permanently in 
his Province, but in the universal practical recognition in 
later days of his principles, both in the great Republic ot 
which Pennsylvania forms so important a part, and in his 
native England. William Penn was no wild visionar}^ in 
his schemes, but a true Englishman with an eminently prac- 
tical turn of mind. He knew exactly what reforms were 
needed, and he bent all his energies not merely to talk 
about their excellence, but to secure their adoption. He 
was no Sir Thomas More, with speculative opinions in favor 
of the widest liberty of conscience, yet dying on the scaffold 
rather than renounce the supremacy of the Church over his 
own particular conscience; he was no John Locke, the type 
and model of the modern English "Whigs in matters of re- 
ligious toleration, whose theory was too narrow to include 
the Catholics within its limits ; and he certainly bore no re- 
semblance to Condorcet, the French philosopher, who, when 
told that his project for the immediate emancipation of the 
slaves would destroy the French colonies, and with them the 
French power, exclaimed '■^ Perissent les colonies i^luiot qu^un 
principe." Far different was the conduct of Penn. He ad- 
vocated, it is true, liberty of conscience upon the highest 
grounds of right, but he did not hesitate to enforce his 
views by telling his countrymen that by adopting them the 
strength and material prosperity of England would be 
vastly increased. From his many writings on this subject 
I select as an illustration of his practical statesmanship an 
extract from a work called "A Persuasive to Moderation," 
in order to show how, when occasion required, he could use 
arguments which seem strange enough to us, coming from 
a Quaker : 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 1 9 

"As things now stand," he says, " no Churchman means 
no Englishman, and no Conformist means no subject. Thus 
it may happen tliat the ablest statesman, the bravest captain, 
and tiie best citizen may be disabled, and the Prince forbid 
their employment to his service. Some instances we have 
had since the late King's restoration ; for upon the first 
Dutch war, my father being commanded to give in a list of 
the ablest sea officers in the kingdom to serve in that expe- 
dition, I do very well remember he presented our present 
King with a catalogue of the knowingest and bravest officers 
the age had bred, with this subscribed : ' As to these men, if 
Ms Majesty will please to admit of their religious persuasion, I 
will answer for their skill, courage, and integrity.^ He picked 
them by their ability, and not by their opinions, and he was 
right, for that was the best w^ay of doing the King's busi- 
ness. And of my own knowledge, Conformity robbed the 
King at that time of ten men whose greater knowledge and 
valour than any one ten of that fleet had in their room, 
would have saved a battle or perfected a victory." 

How then,w"e naturally ask, did William Penn,with such 
principles as these, and with such powers as were conferred 
upon him by his Charter, fail in bringing to a successful 
issue here his " Holy Experiment," as he called it? To 
understand this a somewhat detailed examination of his 
relations with political parties in England and with public 
opinion there on the great question of the time — that of 
religious toleration — becomes necessary. 

The Charter granted by Charles II. to Penn gave him 
as Proprietary ample powers of government in all matters 
ecclesiastical as well as civil. There was but one reserva- 
tion or qualifying clause in it in regard to religious tolera- 
tion, and that provided merely that the Bishop of London 
should have power to appoint a chaplain for the service of 
any congregation, consisting of not less than twenty per- 
sons, who might desire such a minister. Such a provision, 
of course, did not interfere with Penn's general plan, but 
was rather in full accordance with it. The fatal defect of 
the Charter, which rendered, in practice, many of its pro- 
visions nugatory, is found in the seventh section, by which 
it was ordered that all laws passed by the Assembly of the 



20 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

Province should be transmitted to the Privy Council in Eng- 
land, and an arbitrary power was reserved to that body to 
disallow and repeal the same within five years after their 
passage. This power was freely exercised by the Privy 
Council during the history of the Province, and indeed at 
all times whenever the exigencies of the Imperial policy 
(apparently the only guide) seemed to that body to require 
it. Practically, therefore, the most wholesome laws enacted 
by the people for their own government were by the pro- 
visions of the Charter itself wholly at the mercy of the 
Privy Council. By the action of this body the wishes of the 
people of the Province were often wholly ignored, and in 
the end the policj' of Penn was actually reversed. In study- 
ing the legislation of the Province, we must not forget this 
double process through which all laws passed before they be- 
came operative. We may ascertain, perhaps, what were the 
opinions of the people on any given subject, by examining 
the law passed by their Proprietary and the Assembly ; but 
if we desire to know what was really the final form which the 
law here took, we must discover whether the Privy Council 
allowed or disallowed the Provincial statute which enacted it. 
On the fifth of May, 1682, a frame of government and 
certain fundamental laws were agreed upon provisionally in 
England between Penn and many of the intending Colonists. 
This body of laws, known as the " great law%" was sub- 
mitted by Penn to the freemen of the Province, assembled 
at Chester in December, 1682, and adopted by them. In 
this code were the following laws, one " concerning liberty 
of conscience," the other " respecting tlie qualification of 
officers of the government." By the first it was provided 
" that no person now or hereafter living in the Province 
who shall confess one Almighty God to be the Creator, Up- 
holder, and Ruler of the world, and professeth him or her- 
self obliged in conscience to live peaceably and justly under 
civil government, shall in any wise be molested or preju- 
diced for his or her conscientious persuasion and practice, 
nor shall be obliged at any time to frequent or maintain 
any religious worship, place, or ministry contrary to his or 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 21 

her mind, but shall freely and fully enjoy his or her liberty 
in that respect without an}^ interruption or molestation." 
By the other it was provided that all the officers of the 
Province, as well as the electors, should be such as professed 
faith in Jesus Christ. 

Under these provisions in regard to religious toleration 
the Province was governed for more than ten years. No 
complaint seems to have been made in regard to their 
operation either by the Home authorities or by the Quaker 
inhabitants, although Penn, as a practical exhibition of his 
principles, naturalized both the Swedish Lutherans and the 
Reformed Dutch whom he found here, by one of the laws 
passed at Chester. Unfortunately, as the event proved, 
while everything seemed to encourage his hopes of the suc- 
cess of " the Holy Experiment," Penn felt it necessary to 
return to England after a residence here of less than two 
years. He embarked in June, 1684. The motive for his re- 
turn was twofold. He wished to bring to a settlement his 
dispute with Lord Baltimore concerning the boundaries of 
their respective Provinces, and he was moved by a strong 
desire to use any influence he might have at Court for re- 
lieving the sufferings of his poor brethren, large numbers 
of whom were then languishing in prison, undergoing the 
penalties prescribed by law against dissent. He was meas- 
urably successful in accomplishing both objects. He ob- 
tained from the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations 
a favorable report in regard to his boundary claims, and 
by his influence with James H., who became King soon after 
his arrival, he secured the release of about thirteen hun- 
dred Quakers, who were then imprisoned for their religious 
opinions. Strange as it may seem, it is to the methods 
which he took in doing this great and beneficent work that 
we must ascribe the bitter opposition and hatred with which 
he was assailed by the political party then dominant in 
England. It is sad to reflect that to his zeal in doing good, 
mistaken according to the standard of that time, were due 
those trials and misfortunes which pressed so hardly upon 
him during the remainder of his life, involving the loss of 



22 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

his o^overnment and of his fortune, and the total suhversion 
of his wise plans for ruling his Province. 

"When he reached England, in December, 1684, he found 
the nation in a perfect frenzy of excitement, roused by the 
supposed designs of the King to favor the Catholics by 
granting them religious toleration. The humiliations which 
the English nation had undergone because their King had 
become the pensioner of Louis XIV., and as such pledged 
to support absolutism in the government and to give legal 
protection to Popery in England (although the depths of 
servility to which Charles had sunk were not so well under- 
stood then as they are now), were most keenly felt and 
roused the deepest indignation. The public mind was kept 
in a state of constant terror by alleged plots on the part of 
the Catholics to overturn the government. Charles II. was 
generally regarded as a concealed Catholic. The Duke of 
York, afterwards James II., was well known as a professed 
and ardent adherent of that creed. Never had the country 
been more intolerant. Any form of dissent from the Es- 
tablished Church, whether the Dissenter was Protestant or 
Catholic, became odious to the mass of the people. Perhaps 
the most striking illustration of this panic-struck condition 
of the public mind is to be found in the fact that in no reign 
in English history are to be found a greater number of Acts 
of Parliament imposing penalties upon Dissenters than in 
that of Charles II. 

Although William Peim, shortly after his return, had 
been received by Charles II., and interceded with him on 
behalf of his imprisoned brethren, he soon found that in the 
condition of things which then existed it was hopeless to 
expect that the royal favor would be extended to them. 
Charles II. died on the twelfth of February, 1685, having 
been attacked by an apoplexy, which was treated, accord- 
ing to Penn, by some strange remedies, among others 
" plying his head with red-hot frying-pans." James II. then 
ruled in his stead. Here, Penn no doubt thought, was his 
opportunity. The man who had been his friend from his 
boyhood, who had been his father's friend, to whose care that 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 23 

father on his dying bed had confided him, the man who had 
always professed his belief in Penn's principle of liberty of 
conscience, was now the all-powerful King, able, and no 
doubt willing, to release from prison and from further per- 
secution his brethren in the faith. Unhappily for the King, 
in his anxiety to secure religious toleration as speedily as 
possible he chose to set at defiance the laws of his country, 
and to suspend by his own authority the penalties provided 
by Acts of Parliament for non-conformity. The two " Dec- 
larations of Indulgence," as they were called, issued for 
this purpose by King James shortly after his accession, 
proved, as is well known, fatal to him, leading to his de- 
thronement and banishment. We may approve his motives, 
even if we condemn his methods. But the storm of unpopu- 
larity which overwhelmed the King overtook Penn also. 
He and his Quaker brethren were bitterly denounced be- 
cause they availed themselves of the liberty granted by the 
Declarations of Indulgence. It was said that they should 
not have accepted even this priceless gift when the law was 
violated by granting it to them. This is a question of casu- 
istry which I do not care to discuss any more than did the 
Buffering Quakers of that day. The result, however, was, 
so far as Penn and his friends were concerned, that, in the 
feverish state of public feeling, they were more suspected and 
hated than ever. Penn himself was constantly spoken of, 
even b_y well-meaning people, as a Papist, as a Jesuit, as a 
pupil of St. Omer, and even as an emissary of the Pope ; his 
libert}" and even his life were threatened by legal proceed- 
ings ; and it would seem that even some of the brethren of 
his own faith began- to distrust him, because he was said to 
have encouraged the King to set his authority above that of 
Parliament. It is doubtless for this reason, for it has been 
clearly shown that there can be no other, that Penn's char- 
acter has been held up to the scorn and contempt of the 
present generation by the fervid rhetoric of the great cham- 
pion of Parliamentary supremacy, the Whig historian. Lord 
Macaulay. 

While Penn was thus losinsi; his influence and makins: 



24 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

many powerful enemies in England, bis government in 
Pennsylvania was not working smoothly. The anthorities 
of the Province in the absence of the Proprietary seemed 
incapable of ruling wisely. They impeached and turned 
out of office, on wliat were considered by Penn very frivo- 
lous grounds, the Chief Justice, and the Clerk of the Pro- 
vincial Council ; they were involved in constant disputes 
in regard to their jurisdiction over "the territories" (as the 
present State of Delaware was then called); while their pro- 
ceedings against George Keith, the apostate Quaker, gave 
great oftence to the Churclimen in the Province, and were 
made the pretext of violent denunciations in England against 
the administration of Penn's government. 

On the accession of William and Mary in 1688, Penn 
not only lost, of course, all his power, but owing to his inti- 
macy with James 11. he was thrice arrested and brought 
before the Privy Council, charged, not, as formerly, with 
heretical opinions, but with treasonable acts. No evidence 
was ever produced to sustain these charges, and he was set 
at liberty. He was still the object of so much suspicion 
that he was obliged to remain in what is euphuistically 
called " retirement," — in plainer words, in hiding, — lest he 
should be again arrested on charges made by infamous in- 
formers. Hence he was unable, as he had intended and 
desired, to return at once to his Province; a great misfortune, 
as it afterwards proved. At last his enemies became so 
powerful with the Ministry that they induced it to depose 
him from his government and to place the Province in the 
hands of Colonel Fletcher, then Governor of New York, to 
be ruled as a Crown colony. The commission to Fletcher 
is dated October 21, 1692, and after reciting the powers 
conferred upon him as Governor of New York, among 
others, " that he should summon a General Assembly, the 
members of which before entering upon their duties should 
take the oaths prescribed by the Act of Parliament to be 
taken and subscribe the tests therein laid down," extends 
these provisions to the government which he was directed 
to assume in Pennsylvania. 



Religious Ihsts in Provincial Pennsylvania. 25 

As this was the first attempt to introduce here special 
religious tests as a qualification for office, it becomes im- 
portant to understand what was the nature and history of 
these tests. The Act of Parliament referred to in Fletcher's 
commission was that of 1 W. & M., c. 18, entitled "An 
Act exempting their Majesties' Protestant subjects dissent- 
ing from the Church of England from the penalties of cer- 
tain laws," otherwise known as the famous Toleration Act. 
By this Act all Protestant Dissenters (the Act, of course, 
did not apply to Churchmen or Roman Catholics) who 
wished to celebrate their worship publicly without exposing 
themselves to the penalties of the laws against non-con- 
formity were obliged to make a Declaration of fidelity and 
allegiance to the Sovereign, and to take and subscribe the 
test, — that is, a Declaration of their disbelief in transubstan- 
tiation and of their condemnation of the practice of the in- 
vocation of the Virgin Mary and the Saints. 

If the Dissenter was a Presbyterian preacher, he was 
further obliged to profess his assent to all the Articles of 
the Church of England, except that which asserts that the 
Church has power to prescribe the rites and ceremonies of 
worship ; if he was a Baptist, he was excused from declaring 
that he believed infant baptism desirable or necessary ; if 
he was a Quaker, he was required to profess his belief in 
the Trinity according to the Athanasian formula, the object 
being to force these harmless sectaries to disown that sort 
of Socinianism which was supposed to be taught in such 
books as William Penn's " Sandy Foundations Shaken." 

These declarations and tests required by the Toleration 
Act were intended in England simply to secure to Dissenters 
the freedom of their worship. In Pennsylvania they be- 
came, by virtue of the construction which Fletcher placed 
upon the powers conferred by his commission, indispensable 
qualifications for holding any ofiice or post of honor, trust, 
or emolument in the Province, and as such, from his time 
down to that of the Revolution, they were (with the excep- 
tion of that relating to the Holy Trinity) imposed indiscrimi- 
nately, when imposed at all, upon all intending office-holders, 



26 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

whether they were Churchmen or Dissenters, Presbyterians, 
Baptists, or Quakers. 

When Fletcher met the Assembly, in March, 1693, there 
was a feeble remonstrance made by that body against recog- 
nizing his administration, in the absence of Penn, as other 
than provisional, and a claim was more strongly urged, not 
against taking the Declarations and Tests (which no one 
seems to have objected to), but against confirming them by 
their oaths, and not, according to Quaker usage, by their 
affirmations. The Assembly, however, was told by the 
Governor that the absence of Penn was the least of the 
motives which had brought about his own appointment, and 
the members, as a matter of grace and indulgence, were 
permitted to affirm instead of to swear to their belief in 
the Declarations required of them. 

In 1694, the animosity against Penn in England having 
somewhat cooled, the King, moved by the intercession of 
noblemen powerful at Court who were Penn's strong per- 
sonal friends, and who represented the true worthiness of 
his character and the great sacrifices he had made in carry- 
ing out his plans, restored his government and Charter to 
him. Penn at once made preparations for his return to the 
Province, but he was detained in England by public busi- 
ness, and by the sickness and death of his wife and of his 
eldest son. He therefore gave a commission to his cousin, 
William Markham, as Governor, with full power to admin- 
ister the affairs of the Province during his absence. 

In 1696, at an Assembly summoned by Governor Mark- 
ham, " A New Act of Settlement," as it was called, was 
agreed upon, being the third frame of government estab- 
lished here within fourteen years. In this instrument it 
was provided that all public officers in the Province, before 
entering upon office, should make the declarations and 
take the tests required by the Toleration Act. It will be 
observed that these tests are the same as those required 
under Fletcher's rule, which, so far as Penn was concerned, 
may be regarded as a usurpation. They were, of course, 
utterly unlike that belief in God and faith in Jesus Christ 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 27 

which Penn had made the only religious tests by the laws 
passed at Chester in 1682. How such tests could be im- 
posed under Penn's direct authority in 1696 it is hard to 
understand. Perhaps an explanation may be found in that 
fear of losing his Charter which was constantly before Penn's 
eyes, or he may have acquiesced in the change from a con- 
viction tliat no larger freedom of conscience was then prac- 
ticable in the Province than that granted by the terms of the 
Toleration Act in England. However that may be, when 
Penn returned to the Province in 1699, his views on this 
subject seem to have undergone a complete change, if those 
views are to be regarded as reflected in the legislation 
under Markham. He exhibited all the fervor of his early 
faith in the largest religious liberty. Notwithstanding all 
the trials and persecutions which he had undergone during 
the twelve preceding years for his strenuous advocacy of 
that principle, notwithstanding the proceedings under Gov- 
ernor Fletcher to which presumably he did not consent, and 
the tests imposed by Markham in 1696 in which he certainly 
did acquiesce, he, at the first opportunity, restored his orig- 
inal scheme for securing freedom of conscience in its full- 
est integrity. In the year 1700 he proposed certain laws to 
an Assembly held at New Castle, — notably two, — the first 
entitled " The Law concerning liberty of conscience," the 
other, " An Act in regard to the attests of certain ofiicers." 
By these Acts the only qualifications required, both of voters 
and of oflice-holders, were thenceforth to be that belief in 
God and faith in Jesus Christ which had been made the 
basis of his plan of government by the concessions agreed 
upon in England, and by the laws passed at Chester in 
1682. So determined was he to maintain these provisions 
as a fundamental part of his government, that upon the sur- 
render of the old Charter by the freemen in 1701 he granted 
a new one, in which the provisions in regard to religious 
tests are precisely the same as in the law of 1682. He was 
evidently resolved that this fourth frame of government 
should be the last and best expression of his opinions in 
regard to liberty of conscience, and he therefore solemnly 



28 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

" declared, promised, and granted, for himself and his heirs, 
that the first article of this Charter relating to liberty of 
conscience, and every part and clause thereof, according to 
the true intent and meaning thereof, shall be kept and 
remain without an}' alteration inviolably for ever." 

Alas for the fallac}^ of human hopes and promises ! This 
perpetual guarantee did not last two years. "William Penn 
had evidently overrated his power of establishing perma- 
nently here either liberty of conscience or any other of 
those peculiar ideas of government which distinguish him 
as a law-giver. His charter never seemed to stand in the 
way when it pleased the authorities at home to carry out an 
Imperial policy in direct violation of its provisions. Even 
at that time, and with that purpose in view, so as to render 
the accomplishment of their object more easy, the Govern- 
ment had introduced into the House of Lords a Bill to take 
away his Charter from him. The fear lest success should 
attend this movement rendered it necessary that he should 
return to England, and his enforced absence from the Prov- 
ince during the critical period which followed was the 
greatest misfortune that could have happened to it. On his 
arrival in England his influence soon put a stop to these 
proceedings. Still, the hostilit}^ of those who sought to 
bring all the colonies under the direct control of the Crown 
was not disarmed. In 1702, Queen Anne issued an order 
directing that all those who held any public office in any 
Colony in this country, whether that Colony was royal, 
chartered, or proprietary, should take the tests and make 
the declarations required by the Imperial Toleration Act 
so often referred to. In March, 1703, Colonel Quarry, the 
royal Judge of Admiralty in this District, appeared before 
the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, and, exhibiting the 
Queen's mandate, requested that the members of the Coun- 
cil, in obedience to it, should at once take the tests and 
make the declarations required. This Colonel Quarry is 
described by some writers as a "zealous Churchman;" but 
he is spoken of by Penn, in one of his letters to Logan, in 
terms such as he seldom used even concerning his bitterest 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 29 

enemies, as " one of the greatest of villains whom God will 
make in this world, I believe, for his lies, falsehood, and 
supreme knavery." He was, no doubt, a violent enemy of 
Penn, of his government, and of the Quakers generally. 
How far he was responsible for the extension of the Queen's 
order to this Province, or how far he was in league with 
Lord Cornbury for that purpose, does not appear. The 
members of the Council hesitated in obeying this order. 
They urged, as was natural, that they were magistrates 
chosen in pursuance of the provisions of the Royal Charter 
of Charles II., that they had been duly qualified for the exe- 
cution of their offices, according to the terms of a law passed 
in 1700, under the authority of that Charter, that this law 
had never been disallowed or repealed by the Privy Council 
in England, and that therefore it was in full force, a simple 
order of the Queen not being regarded by them as sufficient 
to supersede the Charter, or the laws made in pursuance of 
it. These remonstrances proved, however, of no avail. The 
members of Council, the Judges, and all the other officers, 
with a weakness and cowardice which strongly excited 
Penn's indignation when he heard of it, took and subscribed 
the tests as required, and confirmed their act by their oaths 
or affirmations. In October, 1703, the same tests were 
taken by all the members of the Assembly before they en- 
tered upon their duties. The tests were in the words : 

" We and each of us do for himself solemnly promise 
and declare that we will be true and faithful to Queen Anne 
of England, etc. And we do solemnly promise and declare 
that we from our hearts abhor, detest, and renounce as im- 
pious and heretical that damnable doctrine and position that 
Princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any 
other authority of the See of Rome may be deposed or nmr- 
dered by their subjects, or any other person whatsoever. 
And we do declare that no foreign prince, person, prelate, 
state, or potentate hath or ought to have any power, juris- 
diction, superiority, pre-eminence, or authority, ecclesiastical 
or spiritual, within the realm of England, or the dominions 
thereunto belonging. 

" And we and each of us do solemnly and sincerely pro- 



30 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

fess and testify that in the Sacrament of the Lord's Sup- 
per tliere is no transnbstantiation of the elements of bread 
and wine into the body and blood of Christ at or after the 
consecration thereof by any person whatsoever, and that 
the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any 
other Saint, and the sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now 
used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idola- 
trous. 

" And we and each of us for himself do solemnly profess, 
testify and declare that we do make this declaration in the 
plain and ordinary sense of the words read to us, as they 
are commonly understood by English Protestants, without 
any evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation whatsoever, 
and without any dispensation already granted for this pur- 
pose by the Pope or any other authority whatsoever ; and 
without any hope of any such dispensation from any person 
or authority whatsoever, or without thinking that we are 
or can be acquitted before God or man or absolved of this 
Declaration or any part thereof, although the Pope should 
dispense with or annul the same, or declare that it was null 
and void from the beginning. 

" And we the said subscribers, and each of us for him- 
self, do solemnly and sincerely profess faith in God the 
Father, and in Jesus Christ his Eternal Son, the true God, 
and in the Holy Spirit, one God blessed for evermore. And 
we do acknowledge the Holy Scriptures to be given by 
Divine inspiration." 

It will be remembered that the chief reason given by the 
members of the Council against taking these tests when 
required to do so by the Queen's order was, that there was 
really no legal authority to impose them, the law of the 
Province passed in 1700 directing the members to be quali- 
fied in a difterent way. This plea for resistance was soon 
swept away by the Home Government. The authorities in 
Pennsylvania were notified that the Privy Council in Eng- 
land, by virtue of the authority reserved to the King by the 
Charter of disallowing and repealing all laws enacted by the 
Assembly within five years after their passage, had, on the 
seventh of February, 1705, disallowed and repealed many 
laws passed at New Castle by the Assembly in the year 
1700. Among these laws there were two very important 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 31 

ones, — the first the great "law concerning liberty of con- 
science," in which Penn's favorite conception of religions 
liberty had been embodied, the other concerning " the at- 
tests of certain officers," by which the only qualification re- 
quired for office or for voting was a promise of fidelity to 
the Government. In order to show the determination of the 
English Ministry to confine the enjoyment of civil rights in 
this Province to those only who were willing to subscribe to 
the narrowest and most technical religious creed, I quote 
the opinion of Sir Edward Northey, then Attorney-General, 
giving his reasons why the " Law concerning liberty of con- 
science" should be disallowed by the Privy Council : 

" I am of opinion that this law is not fit to be confirmed, 
no regard being had in it to the Christian religion, and also 
for that in the indulgence allowed to the Quakers in Eng- 
land by the Statute of 1 W. & M., c. 18 [the Toleration Act], 
which sort of people are also the principal inhabitants of 
Pennsylvania, they are obliged by declaration to profess 
faith in God, and in Jesus Christ his eternal Son, the true 
God, and in the Holy Spirit, one God blessed for evermore, 
and to acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and l^ew 
Testament to be given by Divine inspiration, and also, that 
none can tell what the conscientious practices allowed by 
this Act may extend to." 

Immediately upon receiving notice of the repeal of this 
Act by the Privy Council (strange and incredible as it may 
seem), the Assembly, wholly forgetful of the lessons and 
example of "William Penn, passed a new law concerning 
liberty of conscience, by which it was made to consist in the 
profession of the creed laid down by the Attorney-General 
and found in the Toleration Act. Still stranger was the 
action of the Assembly in regard to another of the repealed 
laws of 1700, — that concerning " the attests of certain offi- 
cers." In this same session of 1705 they passed, as a sub- 
stitute for it, an Act to " ascertain the number of members 
of Assembl}' and to regulate elections," in which it was pro- 
vided that all members of that body (and its provisions were 
afterwards extended to all who held office of any kind under 



32 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

the Crown or the Proprietary) should, before entering upon 
their duties, make the same dechiratiou of their religious 
faith and take and subscribe the same tests, in totidem verbis, 
as those directed to be taken by Queen Anne in 1702. It 
is difficult to understand how the people in this Province 
should have been willing in 1705 to reverse the whole policy 
of Penn in regard to religious liberty with their own hands, 
and still more difficult to explain why these laws should 
have remained in full force upon our statute-book up to 
the date of the Revolution, the only modification which I 
can discover being the substitution of an oath of abjuration 
of the Pretender in 1724 for the declaration of the peculiar 
form of belief in the Trinity required by tbe Act of 1705. 
The letters of Logan to Penn at this period throw no light 
on this subject. They speak of the action of the Assembly 
in October, 1705, " in re-enacting those thirty-six laws 
(passed in the year 1700) which the Attorney-General ob- 
jected against, with the amendments he desires, and in 
unanimously resolving to provide for the support of Gov- 
ernment." But there is not a word concerning the most 
momentous change (as we must now regard it) made by 
their legislation in the civil status of the inhabitants up to 
their final separation from the mother-country by the Amer- 
ican Revolution. 

The subscription to these tests was not a mere formality, 
as oaths of office, as they are called, now commonly are. 
They were looked upon as a definite profession of faith con- 
cerning the most disputed points of theology, and such a 
profession in a small community where each man's religious 
opinions were known, and in a day when the profession of 
a creed implied much more than it does now, was likely to 
be regarded as a pretty severe test. At all events, these 
tests embodied doctrines some of which must have been 
very distasteful to those who took them during the seventy 
years they were in force, to say nothing of the opposition 
of the Quakers to tests or creeds in any form. Still, they 
were made the door of admission to every public post of 
honor, trust, and emolument in the Province. An official 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 33 

record of those who took them was carefully kept, and is 
still preserved. There are in the custody of this Society, 
and in private hands, manuscript books called '^ Qualifica- 
tion Books," in which you will find the signatures of all 
persons who ever held ofiice in this Province from the year 
1722 down to October, 1775, or nearly six months after the 
battle of Lexington was fought, — these signatures being 
appended to the Declarations and Tests imposed by the 
Queen's order in 1702, and made further obligatory by 
the Provincial Act of 1705. I ought, however, to repeat 
that an oath of abjuration of the Pretender must have 
been at one time substituted for the profession of belief 
in the Trinity required by the Act of 1705, but when, and 
for what reason, I have been unable to discover. These 
signatures include the names of the Governors, Members, 
and Clerks of the Provincial Council and of the Assembly, 
Judges, Mayors, Chief Burgesses throughout the Province, 
Sheriffs, Coroners, Receivers-General, Collectors of Cus- 
toms, Officers of the Regiments of Associators, the Trus- 
tees, Provost, and Professors of the College of Philadelphia, 
etc., etc. 

In regard to the history of the naturalization of foreign- 
ers here, it has been already stated thait one of the first 
measures taken by Penn on his arrival was, by a law passed 
at Chester, to naturalize the Swedes and the Dutch whom he 
found here. No objection seems to have been made by the 
Home authorities to the exercise of such a power. But in 
the year 1700 an Act was passed giving to the Proprietary 
power to naturalize all foreigners coming to this Province. 
This was one of the thirty-six Acts of Assembly passed in 
1700, which was disallowed and repealed by the Privy Coun- 
cil in 1705. The reason given by the Attorney-General for 
this action is this : " The Proprietary has no such power by 
his grant [that is, his charter], and I think it not right that 
he should give it to himself by this Act." In 1708 the As- 
sembly, probably on some hint that the difficulty about natu- 
ralizing foreigners really arose from a fear lest they might 
be Catholics, passed an Act naturalizing by name the most 



34 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

prominent Germans who had settled at Germantown, giving 
as the reason therefor that these people were Protestants 
who had either sworn to the test and subscribed the Decla- 
ration, or were ready to do so. In the years 1729, 1730, 
1734, and 1737 similar special Acts of naturalization were 
passed, and the same reasons were given for enacting them. 
In 1742 a general Act was passed providing for the natu- 
ralization of those foreigners who had lived seven years in 
the Province, who were Protestants, and who showed their 
Protestantism by their willingness to take the Tests and 
subscribe the Declaration. This law remained in force 
until the time of the Revolution, and of course excluded all 
foreign-born Catholics, Jews, or Socinians from the rights 
of citizenship. 

The same exclusive policy prevailed in regard to the hold- 
ing of land on which churches were erected. In 1730 was 
passed " An Act for enabling Religious Societies of Prot- 
estants to purchase lands for Burying-grounds, Churches, 
Houses of Worship, and Schools," and it was provided that 
any Declaration of Trust theretofore made by individuals 
for such purposes should be executed, leaving, of course, 
property held by any individual for the use of the Catholics 
without legal protection. 

It is obvious from the outline which has been given of 
Provincial legislation that our fathers were determined that 
no one should hold office in Pennsylvania unless he was an 
orthodox Protestant according to the standard of orthodoxy 
which then prevailed, that Protestants alone should have a 
legal right to hold church property, or any property devoted 
to charitable uses, and that no foreign Catholic should be 
naturalized. All this was certainly in direct contravention 
of the well-known policy of William Penn, and of the prin- 
ciple of liberty of conscience embodied by him in the legis- 
lation of 1682 and 1701. How is this change of opinion and 
of action on the part of the successors and companions of 
Penn to be accounted for ? One thing is clear : the history 
of the period fails to show that the people of this Prov- 
ince were ever dissatisfied with this legislation, or that they 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 35 

suffered any practical inconvenience in consequence of it. I 
have searched through the long list of vexatious complaints 
made by the Assembly at various times against the adminis- 
tration of Penn and his successors, and I have failed to find 
among them the slightest hint that the restrictive measures 
against Catholics were regarded by any one as a grievance. 
Indeed, the only appeal I have discovered to Penn's legisla- 
tion in favor of liberty of conscience as a means of protect- 
ing civil rights is in a Protest made by the Quakers in 1775 
against being forced into the military service. They say that 
Penn's Charter of 1701 provided that "no person living 
peaceably and justly in civil society should be molested or 
prejudiced by his religious persuasion in matters of faith or 
worship." They then go on to argue that compulsory mili- 
tary service would be a violation of that clause of the Charter 
which provides "that no one shall be compelled to do or 
suffer any thing contrary to his religious persuasion." 

The law of 1705 imposing religious tests, and the other 
restrictive measures, if we are to judge by an examination 
of " The Votes of the Assembly," were adopted without 
discussion or opposition, and they formed, from the time of 
their adoption, the settled and unquestioned policy of the 
Province until it ceased to exist at the Revolution. If we 
consult our historians, they all tell the same story. Frank- 
lin's " Historical Review," which is one long-continued growl 
at the Proprietary government from the beginning, never 
alludes to the subject, while Proud and Gordon, and the 
many biographers of Penn who are disposed to take a highly 
favorable view of his character and of the government which 
he established here, are equally silent. When the rela- 
tions between the Colonies and the mother-country became 
strained, and remonstrance after remonstrance against the 
grievances from w^hich the Colonists suffered poured in upon 
the King and the House of Commons, we cannot find in any 
of the petitions, either of the Continental Congress or of the 
Provincial Assembly, the slightest complaint against the 
policy of confining the full enjoyment of civil rights to 
persons of one religious creed. Yet this policy w^as essen- 



36 Beligious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

tially an Imperial policy, imposed like the laws of trade upon 
the Colonies for Imperial purposes, and it could have been 
uprooted at any time by Imperial legislation. 

It is not to be denied that there was less difference of 
opinion existing on this subject between the mother-country 
and her Colonies than upon almost any other relating to 
the administration of government. A grievance such as I 
have described would in our day, when by a sort of political 
atavism we have gone back to Penn's principles and practice 
in regard to liberty of conscience, rouse at least as much 
indignation and opposition as an attempt to impose taxes 
upon us without our consent. But we are not to judge our 
forefathers by our standard. To them the value of religious 
liberty as a practical principle of government was not price- 
less, as it seems to us, and Penn's voice proclaiming it 
became literally, after the early enthusiasm had cooled, like 
"that of the Prophet crying in the wilderness." Nothing 
is more suggestive than the opinion expressed by James 
Logan (certainly the most enlightened man in the Province) 
in a letter to Penn concerning the Charter of 1701, by which 
freedom of conscience had been guaranteed perpetually. 
"Be pleased," he says, "not to set such a value as thou dost 
upon the Charter granted, for most are of opinion it is not 
worth so many pence, and if mine were asked, I should still 
rate it much lower." 

The people here, as in the other Colonies, were intensely 
Protestant, and although a large majority of them professed 
to hold Penn's principles, they retained in a great measure 
the hereditary hatred and distrust of the doctrines and w^or- 
ship of the Catholics which centuries of religious feuds had 
bred in England, They were evidently satisfied to extend 
the principle of toleration as far here as had been done in 
England, but no farther. The Catholics were few in number 
(not fourteen hundred in the year 1757), they were of course 
very feeble, and doubtless thought it most prudent not to 
put forward any claims on the score of religious liberty. 
At any rate they were silent, probably satisfied if they were 
not molested in their worship. 



Heligious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 37 

There was another and a special reason why animosity 
against Catholics and unwillingness to trust them wnth any 
power were kept alive in this Province. During the first 
sixty years of the last century this continent, as is well 
known, was the seat of wars between England and France, 
— wars begun indeed in Europe, but waged here also for the 
purpose of extending the Colonial possessions and power 
of these rival nations. France had all the advantages of a 
military power. She controlled our present northern fron- 
tier, she had established a chain of fortified posts from the 
Lakes to the Ohio, she was leagued with the Indians, and 
she boldly avowed her purpose to attack and subjugate the 
English Colonies on the Atlantic coast. Throughout the 
Colonies and in England there was a general feeling that/ 
French conquest meant not merely subjection to the French^' 
Crown, but the establishment here of the Roman Catholic 
religion with all its claims. However chimerical these fears 
on the part of the Colonists may appear to us now, they 
were very real to our fathers, who had been taught that des- 
potism and popery were convertible terras. Every means 
was employed to rouse public opinion so that the Province 
might be fully prepared to resist the threatened invasion. 
The French were represented not merely as enemies, but 
also, what w^as probably much worse in the eyes of many, 
as Catholics, and thus the intensely strong Protestant feel- 
ing of the Colonists was appealed to, not unsuccessfully, in 
stimulating a warlike enthusiasm. So deep was this feeling, 
at least in Pennsylvania, which seemed of all the Colonies 
the most exposed to an invasion, that strong efibrts were 
made by the leading men of the Province to convince the 
people that Protestantism and allegiance to the British 
Crown were inseparably connected. 

In 1754 a Society was established here called the German 
Society, by such sober-minded citizens as Dr. Franklin, the 
Rev. Dr. Muhlenberg, the patriarch of the Lutheran Churches 
in this country, and the Rev. Dr. Smith, then Provost of the 
College, the object of which was to establish schools for the 
children of German settlers upon what was then the frontier 



38 Beligious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

of the Province, where they might be taught the knowledge 
of God, and be made loyal subjects of what was called " the 
Sacred Protestant Throne of Great Britain," and thus be 
saved from the machinations of " French and Popish emis- 
saries." These schools were so successfully supported that 
at one time no fewer than seven hundred children -were 
taught in them. 

But a mighty change in men's opinions on this subject 
took place as the Revolution drew nigh. The Provincial 
Conference which undertook in the early part of the year 
1776, at the request of the Continental Congress, to call a 
Convention to frame a State Constitution, resolved that 
every Delegate elected to that Convention should, before he 
entered upon his duties, take and subscribe the following 
profession of his religious faith : " I, A. B., profess faith in 
God the Father, and in Jesus Christ his Eternal Son, the 
true God, and in the Holy Spirit, one God blessed for ever- 
more, and I acknowledge the Holy Scriptures to be given 
by Divine inspiration." I cannot tell whether the Conven- 
tion obeyed the mandate of the Conference, but it is certain 
that in searching for some test which should be a proper 
Cj^ualification for office under the new order of things it could 
find none better than the old one which had been laid down 
by Penn in his Charter of 1701, viz., an acknowledgment of 
a belief in one God and in the Divine inspiration of the 
Holy Scriptures, and accordingly they adopted it. Thus was 
the memory of "William Penn vindicated, and his great prin- 
ciple of liberty of conscience found at last a perpetual place 
in that very instrument of government which had for its main 
object the disowning forever of his authority and that of 
his heirs in every other respect. The complete change of 
public opinion became every day more apparent. Not only 
was a Catholic priest (afterwards Bishop Carroll, of Balti- 
more) sent in company with Dr. Franklin and Mr. Chase at 
the outset of the Revolution, with the unanimous concur- 
rence of the Continental Congress, to persuade the French 
Catholics in Canada to join the revolt, but in 1779 an Act 
was passed by our State Legislature reorganizing the Col- 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 39 

lege of Philadelphia and appointing new Trustees, one of 
whom was to be, as the Act described him, " the Senior 
Minister of the Roman Churches in Philadelphia." Hence 
it happened that the Rev. Father Farmer, a Jesuit, was, 
probabl}', the first Catholic, and, certainly, the first Catholic 
priest, who ever held civil office in Pennsylvania. 

In regard to the attitude of William Penn himself to- 
wards these religious tests after they had been established 
here by Provincial law, there is some obscurity. It is clear 
that he regarded the Queen's order imposing them upon 
the officers of government in this Province as illegal, be- 
cause it contravened the rights conferred by his Charter. 
On this subject he speaks in a letter to Logan, dated 4th 
October, 1703, in no uncertain terms. " Why should you 
obey," he says, " any order obtained by the Lords of Trade 
or otherwise which is not according to Patent, or law here, 
or the laws in your own country which are to govern you 
until repealed? ... If j'ou will resign the laws, customs, 
and usages tamely, instead of persisting till you see what 
becomes of the laws now with the Attorney-General, I can- 
not help it; but a decent refusal were wisest." "When the 
Assembly in 1705, by its own unquestioned authority, re- 
pudiated the principle of liberty of conscience established 
by him in the Charter of 1701, Penn does not seem to have 
complained or remonstrated. If he acquiesced in it, it may 
perhaps be said that he had no choice. It is hardly con- 
ceivable that a man who had done and suflfered what few 
men have done and suffered to establish the principle of re- 
ligious liberty as the basis of civil government, who had 
confirmed his faith in it, after it had been departed from 
here under the rule of Fletcher and of Markham, by grant- 
ing a new Charter, in which he declared that this principle 
" shall be kept and remain without any alteration inviolably 
for ever," — I say it is hardly conceivable that such a man, 
with such a character and such a career, should have so 
changed his views between the 3'ears 1701 and 1705 as to 
approve of the legislation of the latter year in regard to 
religious tests. There is no evidence that he ever did ap- 



40 Religions Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

prove of this measure, and all the presumptions seem to 
me opposed to such a conclusion. 

It must not be forgotten, too, that in the year 1705 Penn 
was hardly a free agent in the administration of the aifairs 
of his Province. He had been for a number of years deeply 
in debt, — a debt contracted by his generous attempt to 
carry on the government of non-paying Pennsylvania with 
his own private resources. As far back as the year 1696 
he had conveyed the Province to Philip Ford in considera- 
tion of a large sum of money loaned by him, by what was 
technically a Deed of Sale, although Penn always insisted 
that the conveyance was intended by the parties to it simply 
as a pledge or security for the money borrowed. Ford 
having died, his family claimed that the Province belonged 
to them, and called upon Penn to confirm the sale. A long 
litigation followed, by which Penn was worried and har- 
assed beyond endurance, and this was undoubtedly the im- 
mediate cause of that premature decay of his mental facul- 
ties by which his later life was clouded. One thing was 
made very clear during the progress of this lawsuit, and 
that was that his private fortune, added to the money which 
was 80 grudgingly voted by the Assembly of Pennsylvania, 
would not sufiice to support the government of the Prov- 
ince. In this unhappy condition there was but one means 
which he could take to extricate himself from what ap- 
peared to be hopeless debt, and that was the sale of his 
Province to the Crown and the surrender of his Charter. 
He was engaged in negotiations with the Government for 
this purpose at the time when the Act of 1705 was passed. 
And if it met with no open opposition or remonstrance 
from him, it may be that one of the reasons for such a 
course was his conviction that had he acted difierently he 
would have defeated his plans for the surrender of his 
Charter and the sale of the Province. He was therefore 
silent; but we must not infer that his silence was of that 
kind which gives consent. The condition of his mind in the 
beginning of 1705 is well described in a letter to Logan. 
" I can hardly be brought," he says, " to turn my back 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 41 

entirely upon a place the Lord so specially brought to my 
hand and has hitherto preserved from the proud swellings 
of many waters, both there and here. My surrender of 
government is before the Lords [of Trade], ... I can do 
no more. And what with the load of your unworthy spirits 
there, and some not much better here, with my poor son's 
going into the Army or Navy as well as getting into Parlia- 
ment, tho' so many checks and tests upon his morals as well 
as education, with the loads of debt hardly to be answered 
from the difficulty of getting in what I have a right to of 
twice their value, wdiich is starving in the midst of bread, 
my head and heart are filled sufficiently with trouble. Yet 
the Lord holds up my head, and Job's over-righteous and 
mistaken friends have not sunk my soul from its confidence 
in God." It is a sad and melancholy reflection that Penn's 
" Holy Experiment" failed, as so many noble enterprises 
have done, not from a lack of faith on the part of the pro- 
jector, but from a lack of money. 

Still, it may be doubted whether even if Penn had been 
a free agent, and as such able to control the legislation of 
his Province, he could in the long run have withstood the 
pressure of the authority of the Imperial government in this 
matter of religious tests. That authority was then based 
upon the theory of the absolute supremacy of Parliament 
over the Colonies, and had been formally declared by an Act 
passed in 1696 in these terms : " All laws, by-laws, usages, 
and customs which shall be in practice in any of the planta- 
tions repugnant to any law made or to be made in this 
Kingdom relative to the said plantations shall be void and 
of no efifect." We may be quite sure that no consideration 
for the wishes of the people of this Province or any respect 
for the principles of its Founder would have availed in the 
smallest degree to prevent the adoption of any measures 
here which Imperial policy, in the opinion of the Ministry, 
might dictate. The Royal Charter would have proved no 
obstacle, for bitter experience here had taught that Char- 
ters to Colonies might be overridden, superseded, and those 
who held rights granted by them forced to a surrender 



42 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

whenever it pleased the Home government to tliink that an 
undesirable spirit of independence was growing up under 
them. There was indeed always a large party in England 
which maintained up to the time of the Revolution that the 
principle of Royal or Parliamentary supremacy was equally 
applicable to ecclesiastical as to civil aiiairs in the Colonies. 
By this party it was assumed more and more distinctly as time 
went on, that the English Church establishment by virtue of 
the Royal supremacy necessarily extended to all the Colo- 
nies as dominions of the Crown, and that those who there 
dissented from that Church were not entitled to any other 
legal toleration, no matter what might be the Provincial 
legislation on the subject, than that accorded to Dissenters 
in England. Even Protestants were supposed by many to 
be at the mercy of a prerogative which was exercised here, 
fortunately, with great caution. Besides, the revival of the 
High Church feeling under Queen Anne, and afterwards, the 
intense hatred of the heir of the Stuarts, not merely because 
he was a Pretender to the Crown, but because he was a 
Catholic and his chief adherents were Catholics, not only 
made dissent of any kind a very unfashionable practice in 
England, but developed also a strong anti-papal feeling 
there. All the restrictive measures which had been adopted 
to check dissent, and to exclude the Catholics even from a 
toleration of their worship, Avere rigidly enforced in England 
during the first half of the last century. Of course a policy 
so strictly adhered to in the mother-country could not have 
been departed from by the Colonies even if they had desired 
to do so. In point of fact there was no open conflict on this 
subject here. The one thing about which the Colonists were 
in earnest which found favor in the eyes of Englishmen was 
their zeal for a Protestantism which, whatever might be its 
defects, never failed to exclude Catholics from all public 
otfices. If the people of Pennsylvania had not profited by 
the lesson taught them by the proceedings of the Royal 
officers against Dissenters, Protestant and Catholic, in Col- 
onies under immediate subjection to the Crown, like New 
York or New Jersey, and seized the opportunity to place 



Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 43 

by their own legislation their policy in this matter in har- 
mony with that of the Imperial government, it is highly 
probable that they would soon have discovered that their 
Charter presented a feeble barrier against the determination 
of the Home government to compel a uniformity of action 
on this subject throughout the English dominions. 

This slight contribution to our knowledge of Provincial 
history has been made because it would seem that serious 
misconceptions widely prevail in regard to our fathers' rela- 
tions to the general subject of religious toleration. "While 
the truth must dispel some illusions, it can only convince us 
that although the government of this Province was undoubt- 
edly distinguished above that of all the other Colonies for 
its mildness and clemency, yet its Quaker inhabitants did 
share the opinion of the whole world at that time, that an 
orthodox faith was an essential qualification for civil office. 
And it must not be forgotten, as we have said, that if different 
ideas on this subject had prevailed here it would have been 
impossible to make them the basis of a settled policy in this 
Province. How far the conviction that any effort in that 
direction would have been frustrated by the Home govern- 
ment discouraged any attempt at change it is impossible 
to say. It is hard to believe that a man like Franklin, for 
instance, would at any time have approved of religious tests 
for oflB.ce ; yet Franklin's name is attached over and over 
again in the Qualification Books to the Declaration of Faith 
which he was forced by law to make when he entered upon 
the duties of the various offices which he held. He must 
have been literally forced to take such a test, for we find 
him on the first opportunity, when the people of this Com- 
monwealth determined to declare their independence alike 
of the Penn family and of the Crown of Great Britain, raising 
his voice against the imposition of such tests as had been 
taken during the Provincial period. Franklin was the Pres- 
ident and the ruling spirit of the Convention which framed 
the State Constitution of 1776, and to his influence has gen- 
erally been ascribed the very mild form of test which by 



- V ; 



44 Religious Tests in Provincial Pennsylvania. 

that instrument was substituted for the old one. Whatever 
we may have done in our Provincial days, it is certain that 
Pennsylvania was the first of all the States which, as an 
independent Commonwealth, dispensed with the religious 
tests which were required to be taken throughout the Colo- 
nies when we were subjects of Great Britain. As friends 
of religious toleration and as Pennsylvanians, we certainly 
ought to be satisfied when we can claim our Founder, "Wil- 
liam Penn, as the great modern apostle of liberty of con- 
science ; Dr. Franklin, as soon as he was free to act, as its 
great champion; and a Constitution of government the first 
in history in which that principle, as we now understand it 
and have practised it during the last century, was embodied 
as the expression of the popular will. 




RELIGIOUS TESTS 



PRO VINCIAL PENNS YL VAN I A. 



A PAPER READ BEFORE THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF 

PENNSYLVANIA AT A MEETING HELD 

NOVEMBER g, i8Sj. 



CHARLES J. STILL E. 



/ 



4 




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